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MJ Anderson, owner of That Damn Mary Brewing Company and Brewpub opening this summer in Gloucester.
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That Damn Mary Brewing Company and Brewpub already has a following. Pictured with MJ (front) are from left Sam Johnson, Lisa Shivers, Pamela Witthaus, Scott Witthaus and Susan Johnson.
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John and Roxanne Warren, owners of Montross Brewery in Westmoreland County, invite craft beer lovers to sit outside and enjoy their adult beverages. Additional seating is available in the taproom.
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John Warren is the Montross Brewery brewmaster. “It’s a little like being a mad scientist because every decision we make in the process ends up having repercussions in the glass. Beer is a vehicle to artistic expression.”
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Order a flight at Montross Brewery and sample their brews. Growlers are available, too.
Making breweries a destination on the Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula is a marathon, not a sprint.
Just ask Mary Jane Anderson, owner of That Damn Mary Brewing Company and Brewpub, but don’t call her Mary Jane or she’ll laugh out loud. “Only my mother called me that and when she did she was usually irritated at me!”
Anderson is MJ to everyone who knows her and that’s about to be a whole lot more people as she plans for the June opening of her brewery in Gloucester. After 22 years working for the YMCA and many accomplishments in service to the community, Anderson plans to retire in December. It was that decision that set her on the path to attending a 100-hour intensive brew school in Canada followed by a 200-hour program on the business of running a brewery in Colorado.
After growing up in the Philippines, Anderson was home brewing as soon as she was of legal age. “Brewing makes me so happy,” she says of her half-barrel system at home. “It’s the perfect balance of science and art. It sings to my soul.”
Although she initially considered Kilmarnock for her brewery, Gloucester, with its year-round population made more sense and meeting Dean Tsamouras, the owner of Goodfellas sealed the deal. She saw the restaurant, with its ample parking lot and three and a half acres along a stream in the back, as the bones of a brewery that could become a destination for beer lovers.
To accomplish that, renovation has begun on the restaurant side, which will offer a pub menu and full bar. But enter through a beer can-like door on the other side of the building and you’ll be in the taproom, an industrial looking space furnished with couches and games and created from the restaurant’s back room by raising the roof and bumping the space out nine feet. A window opening from the taproom into the restaurant side will allow guests to order food to pair with beer or house-made root beer and ginger beer.
All the way at the back will be the brew house with a seven-barrel brewing and canning system and a half-barrel system that will act as a test kitchen for new beers. Beyond the brewery is an expansive gathering space that’s being cleared out and limbed up to create a bucolic setting for Adirondack chairs, tables, cornhole, fire pits and a stage to host a summer music series.
“Families with pets will be welcome,”Anderson says with a laugh admitting she has an Airedale she loves. “This will be a welcoming place and I want it to be worthy of people coming from all over the Northern Neck.”
To start, the brewery will offer five beers with a goal of eventually keeping 14 on tap at all times. Anderson breaks down beers into either art or science beers, designating the varieties you can get all the time—Proud Mary IPA, Easy Money Amber Ale, Double Dippa IPA and Breakfast, a porter—as science beers.
“Art beers would be like a Gose or a sour cherry Belgian. Wherever your mind can go opens up a door for a brewer because we’ve been given a license to be creative. The ability to do that with beer, how freaking cool is that? I want to have traditional beers but the artist in me says let’s play!”
Her goal is to do everything she can to be as green and sustainable as possible and use as many Virginia sources as she can find, the better to do right by the community. Her beers will be canned rather than bottled, not just because it’s better for the environment but because beer’s freshness is better maintained in cans.
Her motto is: exceptional beers for the very Mary, with the word Mary as a metaphor for whatever makes people happy. Says Anderson, “That Damn Mary Brewing will be solidly built on good beers made with quality ingredients. This is not about how big we can get, it’s about creating a culture of community.”
Just such a culture is already on display at Montross Brewery, after John and Roxanne Warren accidentally became residents of the Northern Neck in 2014. A camping trip to Westmoreland State Park so impressed them that they bought a weekend getaway house, but the day they moved in, they both knew they wanted to live there full time even while still working jobs in D.C. four days a week.
“You go to that park, you move here,” John says with a chuckle in between checking on the temperature of the mash in his brew tanks. “We’ve already dug ourselves into the community.”
The couple had been toying with the idea of an urban winery in D.C., but finding it cost-prohibitive whenRoxanne bought John a home-brewing kit that sat in the closet for months. Once he finally relented and made a batch of Saison, he was hooked.
“He likes beer and neither he nor I have patience,” Roxanne says. “We like results quickly so beer was a much better fit for us, plus there’s an absence of breweries in the region.”
John emphasizes that while wine is made in the vineyard, beer is made in the brewery. “It’s up to you how you want to put it together. It’s a little like being a mad scientist because every decision we make in the process ends up having repercussions in the glass. Beer is a vehicle to artistic expression.”
The cozy tasting room was carved out of a former law office with a lot of the couple’s elbow grease and enthusiasm and exudes welcome and community. One wall is devoted to a message board made of wood planks labeled “Return to the Village,” a place locals can hang fliers and announcements.
Around the two light-strung trees on the front lawn are ten picnic tables, an outdoor bar, a grill, fire-pit and cornhole boards, all cordoned off by fencing of more twinkle lights. During the summer, food vendors will be on site, but guests are always welcome to bring their own food. A special events room next to the taproom allows people to host private events and is used by Roxanne to offer donation-based yoga classes.
Initially, almost all their customers were from the D.C. region—“People were traveling two hours to get here and have the brewery experience,” Roxanne marvels—but in the months since they opened in autumn 2016, that’s shifted to about half visitors and half locals.
Montross Brewery growlers in hand, a couple arrives on a Saturday barely five minutes after the brewery opens at noon. Overhearing Roxanne talking to a writer, the man leans in and says, “Most importantly, the beer is good!”
As is trendy with craft beers, the labels are eye-catching and artistic, designed by New York graphic designer Andrea Roberts, who was also maid of honor at the Warren’s wedding. Equally clever are the beers’ names, which range from the Good Samaritan, which is only brought out for fundraisers, to the Artiste, a raspberry Hefeweizen with 15 pounds of berries in every batch, to the Homewrecker, a Citra Saison guaranteed to be sweet initially, but watch out for that high alcohol content or you may find yourself in trouble. Their old-fashioned ginger ale is brewed from a 19th-century recipe using cane sugar, fresh lemons and real ginger.
Originally, John tried to tap Roxanne for his assistant and when that didn’t work out, hired William Taylor as assistant brewer. The taproom’s limited hours—5 to 9 p.m. on Fridays and noon to 9 p.m. on Saturdays—are the only way the couple can keep a sufficient supply of beer on hand, but their DIY aesthetic, which has served them well renovating, painting, decorating and planting, has taken a toll on their free time together.
They’re okay with that for now. John retires in three years and until then, the couple is determined to dig in deeper as part of the community and help expand the Northern Neck beer trail.
“It’s inevitable that energy breeds energy,” John says of the future. “We really want to see multiple breweries here. Once another brewery gets going, people will see this as a beer destination.”
Montross Brewery, 15381 Kings Highway, Montross, Virginia 22520 • montrossbrewery.com. Open Fridays 5-9 pm and Saturdays 12-9 pm
That Damn Mary Brewing Company and Brewpub, 5036 George Washington Memorial Highway, Hayes, Virginia 23072 (Formerly Goodfellas Restaurant) • thatdamnmarybrewing.com. Opening Summer 2017
